1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system, method, and computer program product for providing improved performance for rebuild of user-defined indexes during partition maintenance operations (partition split, merge, and move).
2. Description of the Related Art
Several database systems, support user-defined indexes that are used in many emerging applications. For example, text indexes are used for keyword search, spatial R-tree or Quadtree indexes are used for multi-dimensional space search, and XML indexes are used for XML document search and retrieval. The basic mechanism of some prior art user-defined indexes is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,893,104 “Method and system for processing queries in a database system using index structures that are not native to the database system”. These user-defined indexes may also be called domain indexes.
Several database systems also support partitioned tables that are very useful, especially for enterprise systems in which tables can become very large. Such database systems may support non-partitioned and local-partitioned user-defined indexes on partitioned tables. However, in such systems, the local-partitioned user-defined indexes must be rebuilt from scratch, as are native indexes, when partition maintenance operations are performed on the partitioned tables. In general, user-defined indexes are much more expensive to rebuild from scratch than native indexes, such as B-tree or bitmap indexes. A need arises for a technique for speeding up rebuild of user-defined indexes during partition maintenance operations (partition split, merge, and move).